Educational leadership in a neo-liberal era: How leadership coaching psychology impacts principal leadership and well-being. A mixed methods study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of the school principal has become more complex in recent years with a myriad of new responsibilities emerging, requiring a more business/performance leadership style (Sugrue, 2014; Oplatka, 2017). Education is somewhat “under siege”, often from external economically driven forces (Deasy and Mannix-McNamara, 2017, p. 59), which have placed a strain on the role of school leaders (Sebastian et al., 2017). Education leaders are now working more akin to business managers, than leaders of teaching and learning (Machin, 2014). Neoliberalism and the drive for efficiency and performance have continued to exert influence over education (Ball, 2003; Machin, 2014; Stynes, 2014; Deasy and Mannix-McNamara, 2017). Across the business world, there have been numerous studies highlighting the benefits of leadership coaching as a means to improve both the performance and efficiency of leaders and their staff (Grant et al., 2009). In recent years, leadership coaching has made its way into the educational leadership landscape (Ogilvy and Ellam-Dyson, 2012; Gross, 2018). The recognition by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) in Ireland of leadership coaching as a means to enhance performance and support school principals, resulted in the setting up of the Centre for School Leadership (CSL) in 2015, offering leadership coaching as a free support to school principals. Looking at other jurisdictions, such as Scotland, Singapore, New Zealand and Canada, the DES sought to evaluate the success of coaching in these areas. Thus, coaching has emerged as a means to up-skill Irish principal leaders in how to deal with the new challenges of leadership, with a “more in-depth talented leader” required for today’s role (CSL, 2015, p. 1). As a new concept in Irish education, leadership coaching is relatively unknown. While coaching as a profession is still under question (Bonaiuto et al., 2008; Passmore & Fillery Travis, 2011), more research is required to assess its impact. With no research to draw on in the Irish context, or certainly very little, this research fills a gap in knowledge of the potential of leadership coaching in the Irish context.The key research questions of this research were: How does leadership coaching psychology impact on the role of school principal and also to what extent does it impact on a principal’s well-being? A pragmatic worldview framed the research with a behavioural framework (Bandura, 1978) guiding the study. A mixed method approach was used, with a quantitative survey followed by semi structured interviews. The findings provide many insights on the role of leadership coaching in education and many suggestions for its future development. In summary, the findings of this study suggest that leadership coaching does impact the role of educational leader/principal, facilitating a journey of reflective practice for leaders and those they manage. This in turn leads to a distribution of practice enabling distributed leadership, therein building leadership capacity. Furthermore, the research concludes that this process leads to enhanced well-being for both the principal/coach and the teacher/coachee. However, time, workload and creating a culture of coaching in schools is still a challenge, with leadership coaching still a new and unknown leadership concept for some.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".